Jazz is supposedly a grown folks’ genre, played by aging bohemians in tiny clubs. Tell that to the Breathing Effect—a self-described electronic group influenced by soul, rock and jazz—whose debut album, Mars Is a Very Bad Place for Love, toes a line between traditional and turn up. As a unit, producer/keyboardist Eli Goss and drummer/bassist Harry Terrell merge the standards of conventional jazz with modern bounce beats. By definition, it scans as "jazz fusion," but the results conjure '70s R&B as well as the contemporary Los Angeles beat scene and hip-hop.

After being sidelined for 2 months with a severe elbow injury, a determined John Cena returns to challenge Alberto Del Rio for the World Heavyweight title. Will hustle, loyalty, and respect be enough to overcome the odds or will Del Rio's menacing cross arm breaker put Cena on the shelf for good?

Arriving hot on the heels of 2010’s highly conceptual Hang Cool Teddy Bear, Hell in a Handbasket feels like an intimate affair but that assessment is relative. Coming from any other artist, Hell in a Handbasket would sound overblown but for Meat Loaf, it’s relatively reflective, containing thunder in its production but lacking melodrama in its composition. Despite the strategic deployment of “hell” in its title, this album has nothing to do with the three previous Bat Out of Hell albums, including 2006’s Jim Steinman-less The Monster Is Loose, but it has Meat Loaf's signature everything-plus-two-kitchen-sinks approach, sometimes stretching past the point of parody as when he brings in his fellow Celebrity Apprentice contestants John Rich, Lil Jon, and Mark McGrath in for the nonsensical cluster-duet “Stand in the Storm.”

The year is 1995, and an energetic senator wants to disarm, perhaps even eliminate, the CIA. To accumulate the evidence necessary to persuade the Senate, he needs the cooperation of Blackford Oakes, now retired. He wants from Oakes an account of his covert activity 10 years earlier, when Oakes served as chief of covert activities for the CIA. But, what will the frustrated senator do to compel cooperation from Blackford Oakes?A Very Private Plot takes the listener inside the Kremlin and the Reagan White House, exhibiting a detailed knowledge and savoir-faire characteristic of the author. The forces unleashed in 1985 threaten any resolution between the United States and the Soviet Union and threaten the lives of a very small unit of young Russians who remain in the memory as the tale reaches a climax.

How will we live well in a super-networked, information-soaked, yet predictably irrational world? The only way to know is to understand how the way we think is changing. As economist Tyler Cowen boldly shows in Create Your Own Economy, the way we think now is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time.